Political Economy of the World – finance capital's impact on political currents and the working class

Theft of a Nation – the IMF / Mubarak Legacy

As mentioned previously, the privatization of state property carried out by ‘President’ Mubarak at the behest of the IMF and USAID beginning in 1991 was a boldfaced looting of the highest magnitude supported by the leading international financial institutions of the world, and with the cooperation of international investors in these enterprises. While this may sound like hyperbole, let us remind our readers that the ‘proof is in the pudding’.

“President Hosni Mubarak’s family fortune could be as much as $70bn (£43.5bn) according to analysis by Middle East experts, with much of his wealth in British and Swiss banks or tied up in real estate in London, New York, Los Angeles and along expensive tracts of the Red Sea coast.

“After 30 years as president and many more as a senior military official, Mubarak has had access to investment deals that have generated hundreds of millions of pounds in profits. Most of those gains have been taken offshore and deposited in secret bank accounts or invested in upmarket homes and hotels.”

While this in itself is not surprising, one wonders how deeply foreign investors, one and all, had paid off the bloody dictator (though Joe Biden insists Mubarak is not one) in order to extract their profits from the backs of the Egyptian working class. Professor Christopher Davidson of Middle East politics at Durham University, tells us the payoff is in fact less than the rate in other cleptocracies in the area – only a 20 percent ownership served up to Mubarak is required to get a business concession.

“Alaa Mubarak [Hosni’s son] allegedly owns $2.1 billion worth of properties in Rodeo Drive… real estate in Washington and New York and owns two royal yachts with a value of 60 million pounds.”

The booty has been spread throughout the Mubarak family and it appears Mrs. Mubarak has decamped to London complete with 97 suitcases (which could contain not all, but perhaps only this month’s lucre). The rest of the family’s fortune is deposited in UBS, Credit Suisse and accounts all across Europe.

However, the mechanics of this monumental thievery perpetrated on the Egyptian nation by USAID and IMF connivance and “new economy” corporate neoliberalism has spawned two entire Egyptian classes who are competing today to rule the country. These two have been deftly described by Paul Amar at University of California at Santa Barbara as: a “military/nationalist” class of capitalists including much of the military leadership of the last decades, with allegiance to the state and national capital; and the “neoliberal crony capitalists” who, along with Gamal Mubarak, are civilians with close ties to international capital and have most benefited from the state asset privatization debauchery of the last 20 years. Yet the former class still dominates Egypt:

“Since 1977, the military has not been allowed to fight anyone. Instead, the generals have been given huge aid payoffs by the US. They have been granted concessions to run shopping malls in Egypt, develop gated cities in the desert and beach resorts on the coasts. And they are encouraged to sit around in cheap social clubs.

“These buy-offs have shaped them into an incredibly organized interest group of nationalist businessmen. They are attracted to foreign investment; but their loyalties are economically and symbolically embedded in national territory.”

The recent half-measures of Mubarak for appeasement over the last week have sacked all civilian ministers from the government and from the ruling party belonging to the “crony capital” class (wholly attached to foreign capital) including, most notoriously, his son Gamal. Despite this attempt to placate both the protesters and his rivals in the military, the military/nationalist class now has the upper hand. That is, Director of Intelligence, Omar Suleiman, the military’s representative, the butcher of Cairo, now has Washington’s ear. He is the one Obama and Clinton have anointed to take over from Mubarak to continue the dictatorship… or in the Americanese language of today, the “change we can believe in”. Suleiman headed the extraordinarily renditions by the CIA to Egypt and even personally carried out some of the torture, including against the Egyptian-born Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib.

Mamdouh Habib, left (and family), tortured in US rendition by Suleiman

Word on the street in Cairo is that Egyptians are understandably underwhelmed by Obama’s endorsement of Suleiman:

“We won’t accept this American plan if it does not cut off the head of the snake,” said Ahmed Mora, a university lecturer among the demonstrators. “America has not been good for us in Egypt. It supported Mubarak for 30 years. If he’s still there, or other people from the system are still there, we will not accept it.”